What is project PHACKS?

The Platform for High Assurance Collaborative Knowledge Sharing (PHACKS) is an EU funded commercialisation initiative aimed at developing the market for advanced, privacy-preserving technologies where data collaborations are at the core of the participants’ collaboration. The project focuses on creating solutions that enable secure and privacy-respecting access to digital services and resources that leverage data assets that each of the participants hold but in a manner where those assets are not disclosed to the other participants. PHACKS leverages cutting-edge cryptographic techniques, including zero-knowledge proofs and secure multiparty computation, to ensure that sensitive information is completely protected during the data processing stages.

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Strategic Context

As digitisation increases across economies and societies, and deepens into almost all aspects of citizens’ daily lives, the requirements for more collaboration are growing. However, for reasons of safety, competition and regulatory compliance, organisations are increasingly cautious about any sharing of sensitive and personal data for two fundamental reasons.  

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Firstly, risks that loss of control of the data will lead to unforeseen commercial and legal consequences, particularly if it involves data that is subject to regulatory compliance, such as personal data.  
Secondly, risks that the quality of the data is discovered to be poor, leading to liability issues and reputational damage that reduce competitiveness or worse.

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Consequently, many organisations will not collaborate because they fear the consequences of information sharing, which undermines collaboration, frustrates collective benefit and exposes a community to additional friction, risks and costs. This problem applies to almost all government and industry organisations in the EU and its allies and partners.

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Technology can both help and hinder.  However, encryption is not the answer because data is still leaving an organisation to be converted to plaintext for processing. In most cases, the requirement is actually to verify claimed data, not to share it.  Here, mathematical techniques can be used to establish whether two or more organisations hold the same data or have the same answers to predefined questions – without sharing any encrypted or plaintext data. No data leaves any organisation and there is no communication risk to the data. As a result, many organisations that would not previously share data are now willing to collaborate to a finite extent.  This is beginning to include government organisations.

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Demand for such mathematically based, privacy-preserving data validation mechanisms is increasing.  EU Project PHACKS is using Zero Knowledge Proofs (ZKP) and similar mathematical transform methods in its platform and collaboration network, with additional security controls to address the two fundamental reasons above why organisations can’t or won’t collaborate today.  It can also help an organisation improve its internal data quality, which improves the quality of decision making and increases overall efficiency and effectiveness.

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Purpose

PHACKS is an EU-funded innovation project to establish collaborative communities in which organisations can validate specific attributes of sensitive data, particularly for regulatory and business risk purposes, without sharing or disclosing any sensitive data at all.

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Scope

PHACKS is funded to form up to 5 collaborative communities, each of which is using zero knowledge proof (ZKP) technology to validate data attributes and potentially detect anomalies between organisations, but without sharing any information.

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Project Overview

PHACKS is an EU-funded innovation project. It is required to establish up to 5 collaborative communities of EU-based organisations that would use the ZKP platform for relying parties to validate claimed attribute data against one or more authoritative source in each community. Its duration is 3 years overall with 1.5 years for building the communities prior to pilots, analysis etc and project closure (Oct 2026) followed by Exploitation. Each community is to be centred in the EU but end user Small to Medium Enterprises (SMEs) and Relying Parties (RPs) can be from outside the EU.

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Collaboration

The list of candidate communities is continuing to grow:

Address verification. Already operational service in Ireland, approved by the Data Commissioner. Next stage is for EU MS organisations to be able to verify Irish addresses, with a view to creating a reciprocal address verification service within each MS
Age verification.
Gambling and gaming.
KYC/AML Enhanced Customer Checks in the financial sector.
Pension provider checks.
Cyber security collaborative anomaly detection for Collaborative Cyber Situational Awareness (CCSA).
Inter-register data quality management and anomaly detection.
Cross-border online drug prescription tracing to comply with the EU Falsified Medicine Directive requirements.

Workplan

There are 5 work packages: 

WP1 – Project management

WP2 – Collaborative community

WP3 – Dissemination, communication and outreach

WP4 – Platform development and customisation

WP5 – Exploitation and growth

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WP 2 and 3 are the main effort now, in order to build the communities and then develop collaborative requirements. WP 4 has developed the platform and some of the customisation, but the requirements for the remaining customisation will depend on the communities themselves. WP 5 is to focus on scale up after Oct 2026. It will start in Q1 2026.

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About the PHACKS Team

PHACKS is operated by Sedicii Innovations Ltd, based in Ireland, and funded by the ECCC.

Members of the Sedicii team have experience in many areas and disciplines in over 40 countries, EU organisations, UN, OECD and NATO. This includes national security, military operations, UN, NATO, counter terrorism, law enforcement, government departments, border control and customs, taxation, finance health & pharmaceuticals, transportation, logistics, aerospace, aviation, defence, maritime, real estate, food traceability, benefits payments, election monitoring and manufacturing. To help organisations collaborate securely, we have expertise in collaboration tools (including ZKP, SMPC, MLC), collaborative cyber defence, collaborative risk management, operations centres, data quality management, access control, identity and access management, identification techniques, biometrics, addiction behaviours, privacy, anti-money laundering, counter-fraud, know your customer, know your business, company registers, age verification, anti-child abuse and privacy in social media.

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Case Study: Gaming & Gambling

One example is our gambling and gaming experience, which includes setting up a high security data centre in Gibraltar for an international gambling company, developing and meeting customer and employee KYC requirements for gambling companies based in Malta, options for enhancing KYC for UK gambling customers including age verification, support for specific UK Gambling Commission investigations, support for online methods to manage gambling addictions, particularly for the vulnerable.  Some of these discussions also involved the NL government experts.

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